In Milestone M5, for the first time, dm Kernel is available standalone. You can get it from here.
What is dm Kernel?
Basically, dm Kernel is everything good about dm Server except support for web applications. So, there are no web apps supplied (not even Admin Console or Splash) and no Tomcat —just the kernel.
Essentially, dm Kernel [...]

(updated 15Oct2009)
Beginning in milestone M5, dm Server 2.0 employs regions to isolate the kernel from users’ applications. This means that the kernel implementation is almost completely invisible to applications and to application management.
Also in milestone M5, support for cloning is completely removed. Region isolation and scoped plans between them offer much simpler and more manageable [...]

In Rob's dm Server Roadmap blog entry, last April, we introduced two new artefact types: “plan” and “configuration file”.
Here is a short screencast demonstrating configuration files, in particular we show how to reference them from a plan.
First, a small web application picks up properties from a configuration properties file—deployed separately from the application. Second, [...]